State changes Belt Line Road renaming plan

After three weeks of furious public backlash from Lane County residents, the Oregon Transportation Commission has watered down its decision to rename Belt Line Road the Randy Papé Beltway and spend $250,000 of taxpayer money on 50 new signs.

Instead, the panel plans to vote later this month to change the name to the Randy Papé Beltline and initially spend $1,500 to put up a sign with that name at each end of the 10-mile highway that stretches from West 11th Avenue in Eugene to Gateway Street in Springfield, transportation commission Chairwoman Gail Achterman announced Wednesday.

In a letter to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, Achterman outlined the commission’s intention to drastically alter its March 11 decision to rename the highway for Papé, the Eugene construction-equipment businessman and former transportation commission member, who died in November 2008.

“Given the demands on our limited transportation funds, we believe you share the commission’s concern about the estimated cost of replacing the signs all at once,” Achterman wrote. “The commission sought a solution that would honor Randy and use less of the allocated sign replacement budget in the short term. … We now believe the least cost approach is to keep the ‘Beltline’ name and add the “Randy Papé” name to the signs.”

The “best approach” now, she wrote, is for one “Randy Papé” sign to be installed at each end of the highway, and to replace remaining signage with “Randy Papé Beltline” signs only as current “Beltline Hwy” signs reach the end of their “useful life.”

“We won’t do any sign changes until a sign needs to be changed,” Achterman said in an interview Wednesday. “So it’s going to happen over a few years.”

The state Transportation Department for more than a year has been quietly discussing renaming the Belt Line to honor Papé, according to internal ODOT e-mails obtained by The Register-Guard under state public records law. The public learned of the renaming plan just days before the March 11 commission vote.

ODOT records show that from January 2009 onward, Achterman, ODOT Director Matthew Garrett and the Papé family all wanted to rename Belt Line for Randy Papé, even though ODOT’s Lane County staff predicted that the public would object to the $250,000 expense to replace all the signs and suggested lower-cost alternatives, such as naming the new Belt Line-Interstate 5 flyover after him.

“The family would like it to be the Randy Papé Parkway to replace the Beltline,” Achterman e-mailed the ODOT staff in July 2009.

“The family prefers naming the Beltline after Randy and so do I,” wrote Garrett in an e-mail in November 2009 to an ODOT staff member.

Upon news of the commission vote earlier this month, hundreds of Lane County residents deluged ODOT with complaints, saying the planned sign changes were a waste of $250,000.

The commission realized it needed to “listen to the public’s concerns,” Achterman said Wednesday. “There were very legitimate and very real concerns shared by the public.”

Papé family spokesman Tim Clevenger said Wednesday that the family — which runs the seven-state heavy equipment conglomerate The Papé Group that was led by Randy Papé until his death — continues to receive letters supporting the renaming and is “still humbled that the governor and the state want to honor Randy.”

Kulongoski spokeswoman Anna Richter Taylor said Wednesday that the governor supports the direction the commission now wants to take with the renaming. “This has always been a transportation commission decision,” she said.

After nearly a year of on-again off-again internal ODOT debate, Achterman in December 2009 asked Kulongoski to ask the commission to rename the Belt Line after Papé, according to ODOT e-mails. Kulogoski complied and the board then voted 3-0 in favor of the renaming, with the $250,000 signage price.

“That was an incredibly kind gesture by the governor,” Ryan Papé, one of Randy Papé’s three sons, who is general manager of the Papé Kenworth outlet in Eugene, said after the vote. “We were surprised and humbled.”

But it’s clear from e-mails between ODOT staff that discussions about renaming Belt Line Road for Randy Papé began shortly after his death on Nov. 6, 2008, and that the family was involved, although it is not clear who first broached the idea.

It’s also clear that the ODOT staff sought to keep the discussions from getting out to the public, and instead had private conversations with selected local officials, including Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken, a number of Eugene City Council members and members of the Lane County Board of Commissioners.

The ODOT staff raised the possibility of naming the under-­construction Willamette River/I-5 bridge after Papé, putting simple memorial plaques at the start and end of Belt Line commemorating him, or naming the $72 million I-5 flyover after him.

“Local agency staff are unanimously OK with naming something after Randy,” ODOT’s Region 2 manager, Jane Lee, wrote to ODOT top administrator Garrett, in a Jan. 8, 2009, e-mail. “However, renaming the Beltline causes everyone to go ‘hmmmm’ for different reasons. Primary concerns relate to expecting public objections to renaming the facility when it goes public,” Lee wrote.

“There seems to be more support for calling it a ‘memorial highway,’ ” she wrote. That signage could be done for less than $5,000, Lee wrote.

Also, Papé had been a big advocate of the proposed West Eugene Parkway, and Lee wrote that his position was not universally shared in the community. ODOT eventually killed the proposed parkway in the face of community opposition, including criticism from some on the Eugene City Council.

Lee concluded a Jan. 16, 2009, e-mail to Garrett on the Papé topic by writing: “My preferred solution would be to go back to Chair Achterman and/or the family and ask for more guidance. As a family member I certainly would have a priority of protecting my family/business name and would be quite averse to negative op-ed pieces … I think the community might come up with a good solution and would support ODOT’s position if we gave them a couple of months to participate in the decision. I also think we need to give them a couple of choices to consider rather than just the Beltline. We could get those ideas if we had more information from Chair Achterman and/or the family.”

The Papé family has maintained all along that the renaming of Belt Line Road was Kulongoski’s and the state’s decision.

“This has never been our decision,” Clevenger said Wednesday. “This has been the governor and ODOT.”

The transportation commission’s official state highway naming policy includes a rule that the individual must have been deceased for at least a year.

In a July 21, 2009, e-mail to Garrett and Lee, Achterman wrote: “We are nearly at the one-year mark of Randy Papé’s death. We do want to name a major feature in Eugene for him. The family would like it to be the Randy Papé Parkway to replace the Beltline. I know some folks have been talking private to local government leaders about this. The family does not want public controversy and neither do we.”

On Nov. 15, 2009, Garrett wrote an e-mail to Robin Freeman, ODOT’s government relations manager, saying: “The family prefers naming the Beltline after Randy and so do I. There seems to be mixed feelings from the Eugene area on this idea.”